Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 7: Make her mine
The clan council met in the great hall that evening.
There were six of them: Callum, Fergus, old Tam (who had been on every council since Callum’s father’s father and who resented change on principle), Morag (whose place on the council was not traditional but whose information was essential), and two of the senior men whose families had been with the MacKinnons longest and who therefore felt entitled to opinions about everything. They sat around the long table and looked at each other over a candle that was burning down, and Callum said what he had been thinking for three days.
“The lass stays. But we need a solution.”
“Send her back,” Tam said, for the fourth time since the kidnapping. He said it every time they met, with the patient repetition of someone who has found the correct answer and sees no reason to change it.
“I’ve told ye why we cannae.” Callum didn’t say it with heat — the time for heat on this particular point had passed. “Whitmore’s been waiting for cause to bring the Crown against us for two years. She walks back to his estate with a story of highland kidnapping and we are finished.”
“So ye propose to keep her prisoner indefinitely?” This from Alasdair, the older of the two senior men, who had the irritating quality of always asking exactly the right question at exactly the wrong moment.
“No.” Callum picked up his cup and put it down again without drinking. “I propose to marry her.”
The silence that followed had several layers. The first was pure surprise. The second was calculation — each of them running the proposal against their knowledge of clan law, English law, the political situation, their own interests. Morag’s silence was of a different quality altogether, which he chose not to examine.
“She’s English,” Tam said.
“I’m aware.”
“Ye hate the English.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
Tam looked at him with the flat assessment of a man who has lived long enough to recognize the difference between a decision that has been made and a decision that is still being made. “Ye’ve already decided,” he said.
“The council decides,” Callum said. “I’m presenting the option.”
“The Laird presents an option and the council makes it happen,” Alasdair said, accurately. “What’s the reasoning?”
“If she’s my wife, she’s Lady MacKinnon. She’s no’ a kidnapping victim, she’s a woman who married into the clan. The English have no claim on her. Whitmore can rage all he likes but a legal marriage is a legal marriage — even the Crown can’t simply dissolve it.” He heard himself say it plainly, which was the only useful way to say difficult things. “She’s protected. The clan is protected.”
“And ye?” Morag said, which was more than she had said in the rest of the meeting combined.
He looked at his aunt. “The clan comes first,” he said. “It always does.”
Morag looked at him with the specific expression she reserved for occasions when she knew he was not telling the complete truth, which was the expression of a woman who has known him since he was a boy and is not prepared to let him maintain useful fictions in her presence.
He looked away.
“She’ll fight it,” Fergus said.
“Aye.” There was no point pretending otherwise.
“She tried to escape this morning.”
“Also aye.” He had retrieved her with the particular combination of fear and fury that he was still working through internally, because she had ridden south in the early morning mist and he had calculated the distance and the terrain and the wolves that had taken a yearling calf two weeks ago and he had been moving before the thought fully formed. He had not examined the speed with which he’d moved. “She’s no docile woman. I know that. But—”
“But ye’ll marry her anyway,” Tam said, and there was something in his voice that was not objection, that was something older and more tired.
“It’s the right solution.”
The old man was quiet for a long moment. He looked at his cup. He looked at Callum with the eyes of a man who has buried people and carried on and learned something from the carrying on about what matters and what doesn’t. “She’ll need to be clan,” he said. “No’ just married. Actually clan. She’ll need to learn our ways, learn to be one of us. If she does that—” he paused. “I’ll no’ be the one to say otherwise.”
Callum looked around the table. Nods, some more reluctant than others, the arithmetic of a council that had been presented with a problem and a solution and found the solution preferable to the alternatives.
“Tomorrow, then,” he said. “I’ll tell her tonight.”
The tower room door had a new lock on the outside. He turned the key and pushed the door open and she was at the table, facing the door, with the particular posture of someone who has been waiting and is not going to give you the satisfaction of knowing how long.
She was still wearing the Highland dress, he noticed. He had not been sure she would. It was a small thing, but he noticed it.
“You said you’d explain,” she said.
“Aye.” He pulled the chair from the table and sat across from her, which was a deliberate choice — putting himself at her level, removing the height that he was aware gave him an unfair advantage in conversations she already didn’t want to be having. “The clan council has agreed on a solution.”
“Which is?”
“I marry ye.”
Her face did the thing faces did when they received information that was worse than the information they had been bracing for. She had been bracing for something. This was not what she’d braced for.
“No,” she said.
“If ye stay English, ye’re a prisoner. The English can demand ye back, and either we give ye back and face Whitmore’s accusations, or we don’t and face the army.” He heard himself use the same logic he’d used with the council, which was the correct logic but which sounded different now, in this room, with her looking at him. “If ye become my wife, ye’re Lady MacKinnon. The clan is your family. The English have no claim.”
“I am already engaged to be married.”
“To Whitmore. Aye. But ye’re here, no’ there, and the law—”
“The law.” She stood up. He stood as well, automatically, and they faced each other across the small table. “You would use the law against me after breaking every possible law by taking me in the first place?”
“The situation requires—”
“The situation requires you to take me HOME!” Her composure, which she wore like armor, had cracked at the edges. He could see it — the anger underneath, yes, but also the fear, and underneath the fear something he couldn’t name that he thought might be more complicated than either. “I have a life. I have a family. I have—”
“A man who kept ye in a house where ye couldnae sleep,” he said. “A man whose soldiers may have killed my wife and my son.”
The silence that followed was a different quality from any silence they’d had before.
She looked at him. He looked back. Something moved through the air between them that was not accusation and was not apology and was not anything he had a word for.
“I didn’t know,” she said. Her voice was quieter. “I didn’t know what he’d done.”
“I ken that.”
“It doesn’t—” she stopped. “I cannot marry you. You cannot force this.”
“I can and I must.” He said it with the full weight of a decision he had made, not a threat but a fact. “Tomorrow. The priest will be here.”
She stared at him. He had expected fury — the kind she had shown in the stables, the towering, precise indignation of a woman who knows exactly how wrong something is. What he got instead was something that landed harder: she turned away from him. She walked to the narrow window and stood looking out at the dark valley with her back to him.
“You can’t force me to say the words,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “I cannae.”
“Then what makes you think this will work?”
He looked at her back — the rigid line of her spine, the dark hair loose, the Highland dress that she had not taken off. He thought about what Morag would say if he asked her. He thought about what his mother would have said, long ago, before the world had given him so many reasons to distrust his own instincts.
“I think,” he said, quietly, “that ye’re no’ the kind of woman who says words she doesn’t mean. And I think that when ye’ve had time — when ye’ve seen what this can be, if ye let it — ye might mean them.”
She said nothing.
He went to the door.
“MacKinnon,” she said.
“Aye.”
She still didn’t turn. “Don’t think I’m not going to fight this.”
“I know ye will,” he said. “I’d be worried if ye didnae.”
He locked the door from the outside.
He stood in the corridor for a moment.
He had just proposed a forced marriage to an English noblewoman who despised him, on grounds of political necessity, and he had meant every word, and there was also something else underneath it that he was not — not yet — prepared to look at directly.
He went back to the great hall and poured a drink and drank it standing at the hearth, and thought about amber eyes and the way she hadn’t taken off the dress.
Tomorrow.
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